The viability of remote Aboriginal settlements has been questioned by conservative politicians and commentators since the former federal minister for Indigenous Affairs Amanda Vanstone, first dismissed them as “cultural museums” in 2005. This was followed by the “Leaving Remote Communities” conference, sponsored by the Bennelong Society in 2006 and Helen Hughes’ book Lands of Shame, published by the Centre for Independent Studies in 2007.
Contrary views have been slow to mobilise, partly because the questions raised — why are health, education, employment and law and order outcomes so ‘bad’ in remote Aboriginal settlements? — are so valid. But “remoteness” alone is not the problem. Just this week the Medical Journal of Australia released a study which showed that Aboriginal people have a higher life expectancy in remote settlements in the Northern Territory than they do in the regional centres of Alice Springs, Katherine and Jabiru, and the suburbs of Darwin.
Outstations, the smallest and remotest of Aboriginal settlements, are located in amenable environments and generally on the traditional country of their inhabitants. They have been and will continue to be an important coping mechanism for people seeking to escape the social pressures of larger centres. Despite the withdrawal of funding support to outstations since the late 1990s, their populations have proven to be quite resilient. The fact is that people can make any settlement and remoteness work if they are prepared to trade off their aspirations for a higher level of services, which generally involves a considerable amount of self-reliance.
The most recent contribution to the viability debate comes from former Keating Government minister Gary Johns who, writing for the Menzies Research Centre, advocates for a “no job, no house” policy in remote Indigenous communities and for people to voluntarily resettle to regional centres. Johns’ account is particularly shallow in its analysis. Through his narrow economic lens, Johns removes Aboriginal people from their local, social and historical context and, in so doing, draws conclusions with worrying implications for other Australians.
There are jobs in the bush for Aboriginal people. Remote Australia paradoxically has been both a region of mass unemployment and mass labour shortages, reflected in high wages paid to mining and construction workers. The barriers to recruitment of Aboriginal people are more related to human development than human resettlement. Simply relocating people to regional towns will not improve their job-readiness. Proximity to jobs does not equate to increased employment. An ANU study has shown that there is no significant difference in the income and employment rates for people already living in the Alice Springs town camps with those in the remote settlements.
Remote Aboriginal settlements do have dysfunctional economies, dominated by welfare and financial transfers. Reform is desperately needed, including welfare reform, but conservative commentators like Johns would have us believe that the problems sit entirely with Aboriginal people. There is considerable unrealised potential for Indigenous households to benefit more from the “business” of Indigenous Affairs, through employment in building, infrastructure maintenance, retailing, tourism, natural resource management, education, governance and other services. The job programs that are working in remote settlements have found synergies with local aspirations and skills, including Indigenous art, eco-tourism, and natural resource management. The pathway is to make the system more demand responsive, not more supply driven.
The tragedy of Indigenous Affairs is the way that we non-Indigenous Australians use it to play out our politics. When we read the writing of the Bennelong Society, and similarly ideological accounts from the Left of politics, we need to be wary of their potential for broader political promotion. There is a strong correlation between unemployment and public housing in urban cities across Australia: would Johns have us implement a “no job, no house” policy for non-Indigenous Australians as well?
We need to be better informed of the successes and failures that are occurring in the “practice” of Indigenous Affairs and not solely focus on finding the “policy solution”. There are no easy solutions here, but successes are coming from the front line workers engaged in day-to-day practicalities: the Aboriginal councillors and health workers, the nurses and teachers, the legions of development workers from regional Aboriginal organisations and governments. This is the engine room of Indigenous Affairs. The types of simplistic “solutions” proposed by Johns and imposed from afar are the greater “problems” in Indigenous affairs.
Mark Moran’s paper “What Job, What House” was recently published by the Australian Review of Public Affairs.
Possum said all this ages ago. You should have used his, it was better
Am a non-indigineous resident of a remote Aboriginal community. I take every occassion to re-iterate Kim Beazley Sr.’s words of wisdom:
“In Australia, our ways have mostly produced disaster for the Aboriginal people. I suspect that only when their right to be distinctive is accepted, will policy become creative”…
At present the authorities are pushing a ” no new houses nor repairs to existing ones unless you sign up to 60 or 80 year leases” policy. Whilst not quite as extreme as Dr.Johns’ proposals it is nonetheless coercive.
I did not hear Kevin Rudd say that his “closing the gap” was supposed to be conditional.
Myself, I think the authorities have a lot of cheek. On the one hand they have suspended the Racial Discrimination Act (on “prescribed areas” subjected to the Intervention) and thus deny remote Aboriginals full citizenship rights, and on the other they are attempting to “negotiate” (if you can call the patronising presentations that tend to end up in frustrated angry shouting matches “negotiations”) with these non-citizens for control of Aboriginal lands.
I think it behooves Aborigines to refuse to “negotiate” until they are given back their dignity and respect. Self-determination is not the lost cause that Government spin-doctors and right-wing “think tanks” would have you believe. Just because its been resisted and sabotaged doesn’t mean that it couldn’t work. I’ve seen it work albeit briefly and until funding was cut or the rug pulled from under by other means such as a moving of the goal posts. Presently they’ve gone one step further they haven’t just moved the gold posts… they’ve removed them altogether!
I read this article with interest as I had the opportunity to visit and spend some time at a remote Aboriginal community a little while ago. In order to get there I had to spend a few days in Tennant Creek. Then several hundred kilometres into the bush to visit. The differences were not necessarily great except for one stand out. Due to the ban on alcohol the overall health and feeling of the place was a vast improvement on what I perceived as a violent and dysfunctional “big” town like Tennant. Sure there were other vices eg. gambling and a lack of employment but the kids attendance at school was excellent and there seemed a sense that with some better and focused assistance the place could be a thriving community. Please don’t write off remote communities without taking a harder look.
This talk of the “viability” of remote communities is very worrying. As pointed out by Moran, remote Aboriginal people’s health and wellbeing is generally considerably improved by being able to live on their country. The Federal and NT government, particularly since the Intervention and the inmplementation of the new NT Shires, have consistently failed to recognise Aboriginal people’s initiative and creativity in responding to needs brought about by the collective stupidities of distant policy makers more concerned about claiming physical and ideological territory than providing services and support. Providing support – not control and ownership – for community owned – as distinct from community based – programs such as breakfasts for school kids and night patrols – is vastly preferable to the sort of prescriptive top-down management that is currently destroying Aboriginal initiatives in the bush. The concentration of remote Aboriginal populations into urban centres has largely brought nothing but grief to the urban centre, and to remote communities, as they watch their relatives lose their self respect, their health and sometimes their lives. Viable for who, one has to ask?? Administrative expediency has consistently won the day as far as remote communities go, and once again, government is moving down the well-worn track of ill-informed and autocratic policy. After all, it’s worked so well in the past, n’est-ce pas?